In a way, we are all poems, probably more Gertrude Stein than Robert Frost; we are chock full of tropes and contradictions, prone to being read in unexpected ways, and alarmingly beautiful in our uniqueness. As with the meaning of written text, our bodies float somewhere between the author (ourselves) and the reader (those we encounter). To paraphrase Roland Barthes, the author is oh so very dead. If they weren’t — if my intention were all that mattered — I would always be read as I intended. I would soon find out. I was at my favorite bar — one with pinball (seven tables, seven! The next week, I’m walking home alone in Brooklyn, late at night, and a man swivels into my path. He could not read me.

Assume Nothing.

Health

Writing prompts. I’ve been asked this question or some variation of it more than a few times in the last few weeks.

I’ll make you a deal and tell you a quick story. Here’s the quick story … I’d love to keep updating this site, but I’m really, really busy. Some of that busyness can be attributed to being so-close-I-can-taste-it to the end of a doctorate.
Ento - the art of eating insects.

Mister Lemur

ACCESSORIES : Bridal Underwear. Sad but beautiful. Bennies. Event planning. Funny. Do stuff SF. Crowdsourcing. COURSES. APPLY. Make Stuff!
Collaboration. Tinyco. Recipes. Poems. Egypt. Character shapes events. Read this Later. Housing for All. How we talk about science. Why are professors at Harvard, Duke, and Middlebury teaching courses on David Simon's The Wire? - By Drake Bennett. Among the police officers and drug dealers and stickup men and politicians and dockworkers and human smugglers and teachers and students and junkies and lawyers and journalists who populate the late, great HBO series The Wire, there is one academic.

His name is David Parenti and he teaches social work at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. He is not a major character, but he appears throughout the show's fourth season—an earnest, well-meaning man defined in part by his naïveté about the inner-city kids whose lives he wants to improve. As for Johns Hopkins, Baltimore's best-known university, it only comes up as a place where the show's police officers can get cushy campus security jobs after they retire. Academia, in other words, is not a culture that the show's creators, David Simon and Ed Burns, betray much interest in exploring. Academics, on the other hand, can't seem to get enough of The Wire. The media scholars offering courses on The Wire treat the show differently.

Individualism

Maybe you’re single and don’t want to be. Maybe all that truck driving, dog walking, kid raising, and company running has sapped your femininity. You’re a woman, and whatever the reason, you long to feel sexy and glamorous for a change. A spa day usually does the trick. But this is a deeper, almost spiritual problem that no spa — or therapist or “Sex and the City” binge — can cure. That’s the premise of the drag queen RuPaul’s new show — “RuPaul’s Drag U.”

Even if you’ve been following the steady mainstreaming of gay culture, this premise may come as a perverse shock. But the women on “Drag U” may just be picking up on something in the culture. For decades, drag has exalted, luxuriated in, and caricatured certain ideas of how it seems to be a woman. The reasons they’re doing it say something about what “femininity” has come to mean — and also what gay culture has come to mean. The benefits for women are clear. Lady Bunny may have cause to worry.